Something You Should Know - What Makes You The Person You Are & Understanding Extreme Weather
Episode Date: August 4, 2022Ever get a song in your head but you can’t remember the title? This episode begins with a simple trick using your smartphone that will help identify almost any song. https://lifehacker.com/how-to-id...entify-any-song-just-by-singing-it-1849039953 Have you ever wondered what makes you different from everybody else? Exactly what is it that makes you the person you have become? That’s the interesting question that Chantel Prat has investigated. Chantel is professor at the University of Washington and author of the book The Neuroscience of You (https://amzn.to/3OJDyHL). Listen as she explains what makes us individuals and reveals why who we are is constantly changing. Weather is really interesting. And today we are seeing a lot of extreme weather - droughts in the west, flooding in the southeast – what is going on? How does weather work? Joining me to discuss the fascinating world of weather is Matthew Cappucci, an on-air meteorologist at FOX5DC in Washington D.C.. and author of the book Looking Up: The True Adventures of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd (https://amzn.to/3vvSceW). The next time you are in a situation where you are feeling nervous or anxious, there is a simple thing you can do that can help bring down your stress levels in about 60 seconds. Listen as I explain how. http://thehealthylivinglounge.com/2009/08/06/12-instant-benefits-of-humming-daily PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Factor makes it easy to eat clean 24/7, with fresh, delicious, prepared meals! Head to https://go.factor75.com/something120 & use promo code Something120 to get $120 off! Start hiring NOW with a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to upgrade your job post at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Offer good for a limited time. Truebill is the smartest way to manage your finances. The average person saves $720 per year with Truebill. Get started today at https://Truebill.com/SYSK! See for yourself why teams at Airtable, Dropbox, HubSpot, Zendesk, and thousands of other companies use Zapier every day to automate their businesses! Try Zapier for free today at https://zapier.com/SYSK Go to https://Shopify.com/sysk for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features! Redeem your rewards for cash in any amount, at any time, with Discover Card! Learn more at https://Discover.com/RedeemRewards The magic is waiting! Download Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells, for free, from the iOS App Store or Google Play today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Today on Something You Should Know, a great way to identify a song that you know you know,
but can't think of the title. Then, what makes you, you? And why are you different than me? We have to turn to the brain,
which is this organ whose job is to form
every thought, feeling, and behavior that you identify with.
So what is it about brains that differ?
And spoiler alert, it's not just wiring
that make each of us individuals.
Also, if you can hum,
you can relieve stress in about a minute.
And how weather works, from extreme weather to the speed of a raindrop.
Ordinarily with most raindrops, they're falling at about 14, 15 miles per hour.
If it's a snowflake, it falls at about 2 or 3 miles per hour.
If it's a hailstone, I mean, heck, those things can come down at 100, 120 miles per hour.
My windshield is a testament to that, or I guess my lack of windshield.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast.
And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know,
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Maybe you already knew this, but I've asked a couple
of people and they didn't know it. But you know when you have a song
stuck in your head or maybe you hear it in the background at a store or something and you know
you know it but you can't remember the name of it and it's driving you crazy? Well it turns out that
the Google app on your smartphone can help you identify the song if you just sing or hum or
whistle some of it. It'll tell
you the name of the song or it'll give you some possible titles to choose from
based on what you sang or whistled or hummed. And according to Lifehacker.com
the app works surprisingly well. All you do is open the regular Google app on
your phone and then in the search bar tap the microphone
and then ask, what's this song? Or tap where it says search a song and start humming, whistling,
or singing and see what it says. And that is something you should know.
I think we can all pretty much agree that no two people are alike.
We're all individuals with lots of differences.
But what is it that makes us so different?
Why are you the way you are and I'm the way I am?
It's an interesting question, and it's one that Chantel Pratt seems to know a bit about.
Chantel is professor at the University of Washington with appointments
in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Linguistics, and she's author of a book
called The Neuroscience of You, How Every Brain is Different and How to Understand Yours.
Hi, Chantelle. Welcome.
Hi. Nice to be here.
So explain what you mean by the neuroscience of you. The neuroscience of you
is the science behind what we all know intuitively, and that is that our brains make us
ourselves. So anytime you hear or say in a casual conversation, I'm not wired that way,
you're expressing either an explicit type of knowledge
based on something you learned or just an intuitive understanding that something about
our biology and our experiences gets laid down in our brains and it affects the way we behave.
What you're saying then is that that kind of makes you who you are or it's at least part of
why you're different than I am.
Exactly. We have to turn to the brain, which is this organ in the body whose job is to form every thought, feeling, and behavior that you identify with as you. So what is it about brains
that differ? And spoiler alert, it's not just wiring that make each of us individuals.
But it would seem if you took, hypothetically speaking, your brain and my brain and put them
next to each other, they probably look pretty similar. I mean, so how are they different?
Or are they different to the naked eye? And if they're not, maybe that's not even important. But
they clearly look the same, but they're not the same.
It's such a great question because there's a lot packed into the same or different.
And when it comes to brains, a little tiny difference can make a huge, can have huge implications.
So think about the fact that our DNA, the DNA that builds our brains and a chimpanzee brain are 95% overlapping.
Chimpanzees are fantastic, intelligent, complicated social creatures, but they still spend the majority of their day in the wild gathering food and grooming one another to promote social bonds.
While we communicate in this shared symbolic language
that allows me to talk with your listeners about what I know.
That 5% makes a huge difference.
So how much of who I am is under my control?
How much of, because you've used the phrase a couple times, the average person. Is there an average person? And how much of what I do say,
think is really my doing and saying and thinking or my brain? I'm pre-wired that way.
When we consider the idea of normal and abnormal, just like left and right-handed,
only it has a lot bigger consequences, we tend to think of it as a dichotomy.
We tend to think of normal as a point and abnormal as a different point.
But the truth is that you cannot define something as abnormal or atypical without understanding
the way people vary in the normal range.
So when I say on average, what I really mean is that these are studies that have
done by taking a lot of different people and creating a blurred template that can be applied
to everyone, but doesn't fit everyone exactly well. So it's kind of like one size fits all
clothes don't fit anybody well. A one size fits all view of neuroscience can be applied and you can make inferences about individuals, but it doesn't explain a lot of the variability.
So that's one.
What does it mean to be normal?
Number two, how much of what neuroscientists think that your perception of control is an illusion and that your brain,
in fact, is largely driven by unconscious or implicit knowledge. And that this part of your
brain that I like to call, I like to think of it like a horse and a rider, this conscious part of
your brain that can guide you to behave differently. It can guide you to behave flexibly.
It can control the kinds of things you pay attention to
and the behaviors that you execute.
But it's important, really, really important
to understand that if I say your brain makes you this way
or your brain makes you behave this way,
it neither means that you were born that way, nor that this thing
cannot change. In fact, one of the things that makes brains so hard to understand is that they
are changing on a millisecond by millisecond basis. Every new piece of information that you take in,
every new experience that you have changes your wiring.
It changes your connections. And by virtue, it changes the way you will behave.
So whether the interpreter in your brain notices this and starts telling you a different story
about why you're doing what you're doing or not is a really interesting question. But know that
just because your brain makes you this way does not mean that
you cannot gain new knowledge or gain new experiences that will change your behavior
or your brain, because your brain is changing in every second, every millisecond.
Well, often during the day, you have, you know, competing things going on in your brain. You want
to do that, but you know, you should do that. And what's going on there
and who typically wins the battle? So the vast majority of behaving animals on the planet
survive with this implicit knowledge by learning what kinds of contexts and what kind of behaviors
move you toward good things and away from bad things. It's a very basic system that works
for the vast majority of behaving animals on the planet. And it guides us quite a lot.
And we have this incredible power to learn not only from touching the stove to see how hot it is,
but to follow instructions. Language allows us to tell each other, hey, I know this thing.
And if you hold this thing in mind, you can behave in a different way. You can skip the
whole touching the stove thing altogether if you're a trusting individual. And we can program
our brains on the fly to behave according to instructions. But it's hard. I love this quote
from Maya Angelou that says, do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better,
do better. I love it and it inspires me to do better. But at the same time, I know that's hard
and I know why it's hard. Because until something becomes habitual, until you've practiced it enough that your brain moves you in this direction,
your brain agrees that this is the way
to move toward good things and away from bad things,
you've got to actively be holding
that piece of information in mind
and using it to guide your behaviors.
So I think when we feel pulled,
when we feel like we're two different people or when we feel pulled, when we feel like we're two different people, or when we feel like,
why did I behave in a way that is inconsistent with the way I think I want to behave?
We need to consider that we're not the same. If you believe that your brain makes you you,
we're not the same person at every moment in time. Your brain is in a different state,
and your brain made a different choice. It wanted something different at that point in time. Your brain is in a different state and your brain made a different choice. It wanted something different at that point in time. But there are some things that I
am seemingly wired to do at every point in time. Like I don't struggle with not killing somebody
at any point in time. That's just who I am. I don't do that. And I'll never do that.
Right. I totally agree. And I think that it's
not hard work for your brain to not kill somebody. This is for the vast majority of us. That is a
very hardwired no. That's something we move away from. We move away from harm, harming ourselves,
harming others. But it's interesting to think that like on the flip side, so what you, how hard you will work for something
is related to your brain's value system. And value is a, is in and of itself a really
interesting word, but at the basic level, how good your brain estimates some choice to be
is related to how much dopamine, how much of a feel-good reward chemical you'll
get in your brain.
And that dopamine signal drives us toward things that are very basic, like food and
water, but it also drives us toward things like compliments or jokes or experiences or
knowledge.
The brain finds knowledge rewarding.
So when you feel curious, that's your brain saying, go toward this piece of knowledge.
It's going to be good.
That's different for everybody, right?
Like we know that people have different levels of epistemic curiosity or wanting to know
facts and that these different levels of curiosity also relate to how much dopamine their brain releases when they're put in front of a trivia question or a video with a magic trick that asks, and you ask them, how much do you want to know how this works?
We're discussing what makes you who you are.
And my guest is Chantel Pratt.
She is a neuroscientist and author of the book The Neuroscience of You.
Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know
called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen,
of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again.
And we can't do that alone.
So we're inviting the cast and crew
that made the show along for the ride.
We've got writers, producers, composers, directors,
and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well,
including some certain guys
that played some certain pretty iconic brothers.
It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice
in the best way possible.
The note from Kripke was,
he's great, we love him,
but we're looking for like a really intelligent
Duchovny type.
With 15 seasons to explore,
it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes.
So please join us and subscribe
to Supernatural then and now. People who listen to something you should know
are curious about the world,
looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.
So I want to tell you about a podcast
that is full of new ideas and perspectives
and one I've started listening to
called Intelligence Squared.
It's the podcast where great minds meet.
Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more.
A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.
That's pretty cool.
And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.
Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.
Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.
Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.
So Chantel, one of the things I think is interesting and that I have thought about is I have a sense of who I am.
And there are people who know me or think they know me, but I have always suspected that the person they think I am is not who I think I am.
And probably the person they think they are is not who I think they are.
That is such an interesting insight.
So I should tell you that my husband is also a neuroscientist and that this is a conversation that we've had.
And the question is, we know that there are places where those things don't align.
But the question is, we know that there are places where those things don't align. But the question is, who is actually correct?
So on the one hand, it seems obvious to say you're correct because you have access to
all.
And what I mean is you're correct about yourself because you have access to all of these things
that are going on in the inside, right? Like you have access to your emotions and the state, your goals and the state that drives
you to behave in a certain way.
When another person is trying to understand you, they have only observable behaviors.
Are your fists clenched and your eyebrows raised or lowered when you say the thing you
say?
They have only observable cues.
And the better they know you, the more of these observable cues they have, the better of a model they've
created of you, right? So the more observations you have of a person, the better you can predict
how they'll behave in a new situation, the more you feel like you understand this person.
But here's where I think this gets interesting because
first, we don't actually have conscious awareness of many of the things that drive our behaviors,
right? Like I was saying, these automatic processes are just driving you through the world
and the part of your brain that is conscious is telling you a story about why you did what you did, but it is just an interpretation.
So the person who is watching you behave is making an inference about your behaviors, but they don't have a dichotomy.
They haven't divided it up into these are the behaviors that you know you're doing, you know why you're doing what you're doing. And these are the behaviors that are
automatic. They're just watching your pattern of behaving and characterizing you. Whereas your
brain is telling you a story and that story allows you to conveniently interpret things
that line up with your vision of self, right? So it's very clear that your sense of yourself will probably be different
in important ways than others who know you well. And the interesting question is, are both of those
views equally valid? And I think yes. You were talking a little while ago about curiosity. And
so here's my question is, I'm interested in podcasting. You're interested in neuroscience.
Something pulled us in the direction we went.
I went this way.
You went that way.
And I imagine it has to do with curiosity that I saw something and followed it.
And you saw something and followed it.
Is that fair? When we feel curious, the feeling of curiosity, like, hmm, I wonder what, blah, blah, blah.
I wonder what the answer to this question is.
The feeling of curiosity arises because your brain has decided that a piece of information is valuable.
It actually releases feel-good dopamine in front of the question,
telling you, oh, move here. This is a reward, just like ice cream, the same
kind of signaling in your brain. And what's really cool about that, it's very convenient,
is that when dopamine is released in the brain, it increases plasticity, which means it sets you up for learning.
If a brain feels curious and dopamine is released
and you give it information,
it is more likely to remember that information
than if you give it that same information
when it's not in a state of curiosity,
when it's not in a state of wonder.
So the brain says, hey, this is gonna be really valuable,
it's gonna be really important or even just really interesting. And then you learn the fun fact
and you remember it. If you think about how this would work in the wild, right? Like we find
yourself in a new neighborhood or you take a wrong turn on a hike you're on in the wilderness
and your brain has to decide I'm somewhere where I don't have knowledge. This is
unknown. I might find something really cool, but something in here might kill me or hurt me.
So your brain, whenever you come to the unknown, your brain is assessing based on your whole life
of experiences, whether this is a seek and explore
situation or a turn and run situation. And that's the idea of threat. And so if your brain evaluates
this new situation as threatening, it will not make you feel curious. It will shut down curiosity,
which means that then if somebody continues to give you information, it's the
opposite of curiosity. You're not open to it. You're not plastic. You're not going to lay that
information down. And I think we need to understand this when we're trying to communicate with
somebody who believes differently than us and just trying to hammer we're right into their heads.
It will have the opposite effect. If you're insisting,
if you're putting someone in a state where you're like, I'm right and you're wrong,
and you're insisting on something, it's not going to open them up to curiosity.
Are there things about my brain, things that are like you in early on in this conversation,
we talked about, you know, I'm not wired that way. Are we wired in certain ways
that are relatively difficult to change? For example, some people are loners and some people
are very social. If you're a loner, is it worth trying to be more social or you're probably wired
that way? And if that's true, then are there other things that are probably wired that way? I personally would love for loners to just accept and love that they're loners. I feel like this
world is full of too many ways to make yourself better and not just to understand and appreciate
that if you are wired that way, after hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate brain evolution,
there's probably a pretty good reason that some people
work like that. And introversion and extroversion is one example of this. We know that introverts
and extroverts have different reward systems. They have different receptors that are sensitive
to dopamine, that reward chemical, and that there is some portion of that that's genetic.
And one of the things that I find really fascinating, and this explains so much if
you reverse engineer it, is that extroverts, the brains of extroverts respond more strongly to
unexpected rewards than the brains of introverts do. So if I'm an extrovert and I'm walking down
the road and I find X, my brain is going to respond like it's vanilla ice cream,
while an introvert's brain might respond like it's, I don't know, a granola bar. I'm thinking
of something else that I think is good, but less good. And you have to remember that that dopamine response creates plasticity, right? So when my
brain finds X and it's like, oh my gosh, this is like vanilla ice cream. This is awesome.
What happens is that it reinforces all of the activities that led me to that place,
that led me to go out the door and choose the series of things I chose that led me to find
whatever it was that I found. So extroversion is characterized by seeking stimulation from the
outside. And it makes sense because an extrovert's brain is incredibly sensitive to unexpected
surprises, positive surprises. So this is just one example of how different doesn't
necessarily mean better or worse, but how there are some pretty strong genetic components in the
way that our brains are built and the way that our brains respond to dopamine that can drive
a whole host of behaviors. As we wrap this up, is there anything about how the brain works to make you who you are that you want people to know? Some juicy little nugget?
Probably the juiciest thing in my mind about the brain is just to understand that there's no other brain on the planet exactly like yours. everyone's brain really is a snowflake to avoid a cliche. But when you're trying to
interact with someone else, the more similar their brain is to yours, the easier that is
going to be. The easier it's going to be to reverse engineer their behavior and figure out
why they do what they do. So keep in mind that if you're standing in front of a person who you think
is behaving in a totally ridiculous way, this probably means that they're wired differently
and that this way of behaving is absolutely rational to their brain.
So I think this has been really helpful in understanding, you know, what makes people
different? Why do some people do this and other people do that?
And it's more than just some people are like that.
There's a lot going on here.
Chantel Pratt has been my guest.
She's a neuroscientist, and the name of her book is The Neuroscience of You.
And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.
Thanks, Chantel.
Thank you so much.
This was really fun and very thought-provoking.
Do you love disney then you are going to love our hit podcast disney countdown i'm megan the magical
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The weather is something you notice and are conscious of every day.
There's a good chance you talk about the weather every day.
You probably look at a weather forecast on TV or on your phone
because the weather where you are will determine what you wear,
where you go, if you go, how you feel.
Weather is a big part of our lives, and in many ways it fascinates us.
But probably not as much as it fascinates Matthew Capucci.
He's an on-air meteorologist at Fox 5 DC in
Washington. He publishes daily articles in the Washington Post,
and he is author of the book, Looking Up, The True Adventures
of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd. And he's here to talk weather,
including a lot of things
about the weather you probably never knew.
Hi, Matthew.
Welcome.
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Well, the weather seems to be on a lot of people's minds because, as we see on the news,
there are a lot of extremes.
We see, in some parts of the country, high heat, fires, drought.
In other parts of the country, there's flooding.
We're seeing a lot of extremes. Yeah, definitely. We talk about precipitation extremes, whether it be drought
or flooding, and people find it hard to believe that both are actually linked to climate change.
And we think, how can two antithetical opposites be driven by the same cause? And what happens
is that as the air temperatures warm, every degree
Fahrenheit the atmosphere warms, the air can hold about 4% more water. What that means is that where
water vapor is available, i.e. in the Southeast, the Deep South, the Eastern seaboard where we
have the Gulf of Mexico nearby, you can hold a lot more water in the air and there's water that's
available for that air to take in and you get heavier downpours, more extreme flood events.
But over the West, the Pacific's really cool.
You don't get as much water vapor in the air.
And so for that reason, when you have the warmer temperatures, you just suck the water
out of the ground.
You dry out the landscape that reinforces drought, that causes temperatures to warm
up even more.
And so drought really becomes entrenched in the West thanks to climate change.
So again, two sides of the same
coin that are very much opposites. But it does seem, I mean, I live in Southern California and
we're in a drought now and everything's dried up. But it does seem to go in cycles. We're always
seemingly in a drought, but eventually it seems to go away for a while. So it comes and goes.
It definitely does. And that's one of the tenets of climate change that we're seeing these days.
People tend to have the same weather for longer, but they get stuck in these patterns that might
set up for an entire summer. Now, right now across the West, it's hard to believe that about
7.85, roughly 8% of the entire Western U.S. is under top tier exceptional drought. That's the
worst category. We're talking
the kind of drought where reservoirs dry up and species have to migrate and change their patterns.
But as a whole, the top two categories, severe and exceptional drought, occupy more than a third of
the land in California, particularly Central California, is in a pretty bad state right now.
SoCal, Los Angeles is getting a little bit better, but really the entire state
is under a drought and we're seeing more extreme fire behavior as a result of that.
One of the things I wonder about is when we see extreme weather like we're seeing now,
is it the worst it's ever been? Or do these things go in cycles and we've been here before or what?
And I think that one of the worst things the media can do is use the term ever.
This is the worst drought ever.
This is the hottest temperature ever because in reality, we only have about 150, if that,
years of good observations from which we can reliably draw conclusions.
So I try with my viewers and with my audience to focus not so much on the milestones, hey,
the hottest temperature ever, the this, the that. I try to focus more on the trends. Each year, we're seeing
an increase of blah, or we're seeing a tendency for blah to occur more frequently or in more
intense spurts, because people are much more perceptive to changes than they are individual
anecdotes. People can remember if conditions are changing versus one generation two generations ago so can you explain
rain where does it come from what is it what makes it fall out of the sky what is rain
that's that's a good question i like getting back to the basics really rain to come from any liquid
out there we could be drinking dinosaur urine and this water could be,
you know, in a hundred million years in a wishing well somewhere over in the Vatican, just crazy
stuff like that. And so rain really begins with water in the ground. Any moisture either on the
ground, in the ground, or perhaps in the oceans evaporates when you have temperatures warming.
So once that evaporation occurs, you have water vap. It's an invisible gas. You can't see it. You can't smell it. You only begin to see it when
the air reaches what's called saturation. Now, the air has a capacity as to how much water it can hold.
So once the air's capacity is overwhelmed, it says, hey, can't take any more water.
Suddenly, the water condenses. You have temperatures reaching the dew point. You get a cloud to form, and that's exactly what happens.
A fog bank just means you have too much water in the air.
Some of it has to condense and get out of the air.
Now, eventually, some of those droplets of cloud coalesce and form raindrops, and those fall down to the surface and precipitate.
Ordinarily, with most raindrops, they're falling at about 14, 15 miles per hour.
If it's a snowflake, it falls at about 2 or 3 miles per hour. If it's a hailstone, I mean, heck, those things can come down at 100, 120 miles per hour. If it's a snowflake, it falls at about two or three miles per hour.
If it's a hailstone, I mean, heck, those things can come down at 100, 120 miles per hour.
My windshield is a testament to that, or I guess my lack of windshield three times is a testament
to that. But yeah, it's a very interesting process and it's constantly repeating every single day.
And what is hail? Why does it sometimes seemingly, it's raining and now it's hailing?
Yeah, so contrary to popular belief, hail actually only forms from thunderstorms. It is not a cold
season sort of thing because, yeah, you get sleet in the wintertime, completely different thing.
Hail is what happens when you have updrafts, very strong upward motion in thunderstorms that might
carry liquid rainwater to 30, 40, 50,
60,000 feet. Now, anytime you're in an airplane, summertime, wintertime, I don't care when,
if you fly high enough, you get really cold air. And so these thunderstorms grow so tall,
they reach this layer and suddenly all the liquid that is being carried up by these powerhouse
potent thunderstorm updrafts cools, it freezes, it has to freeze onto something. So condensation nuclei, whether it be a bug, a piece of dustrafts, cools, it freezes, it has to freeze onto something,
so condensation nuclei, whether it be a bug, a piece of dust, pollen, whatever, and it becomes
ice. Now, with every time that little piece of ice, that fledgling hailstone gets tossed around
inside the cloud, it can accrete a new layer and a new layer, and suddenly it grows larger and
larger. And if you ever slice a hailstone open, you'll see these onion-like layers.
Now, the hailstone can remain suspended so long as it isn't too heavy for the thunderstorm updrafts. If you have a 100-mile-an-hour updraft, air going straight up at 100 miles per hour,
which is feasible in severe and super-south thunderstorms, you might get baseball-sized hail.
If you want gargantuan hail, we're talking 6 to 8 inches across, you might need 150 mile per hour updraft,
which is why oftentimes the same storms that produce the biggest hail are the ones that are
tornadic, that produce twisters, funnel clouds, all that stuff. These are usually the rotating
supercells. But I've seen hail to about softball size before. My vehicle is all dented up. I
actually have a cage built around the truck to protect against that giant hail. But it is a very mystical thing
to see the rain suddenly lift, the cloud bases lift, and suddenly you have these boulders of ice
shattering on impact with the ground. And sleet is something else entirely,
but I think people sort of get them confused. They do, yeah. So sleet and something else
called grapple are things that form in the wintertime from clouds that might be producing snow,
might be producing a mix.
Sleet is a form of wintery mix.
What happens, you have essentially a raindrop
that is falling out of the cloud,
but it hits a cool layer before it hits the ground.
So you have warm near the clouds, then a cool layer.
So liquid precipitation freezes into a little pellet
and that's what sleet is.
Grapple is something completely different
and most people don't even know what grapple is.
It looks almost like Dippin' Dots,
little soft, crunchy snow pellets.
And what happens for that,
you have a snowflake that begins to melt a little bit
and it passes through a shallow layer
of super cooled water droplets or tiny droplets of water
that are liquid below 32 degrees.
And suddenly all these little droplets accrete onto the edge of this snowflake and you get a crunchy snow pellet. So that's what below 32 degrees. And suddenly all these little droplets accrete onto the edge
of this snowflake and you get a crunchy snow pellet. So that's what grapple is. It looks like
sleet. It sounds a little bit differently. And if you're a meteorologist or someone who really pays
attention to these things, you notice it. How often does, because I've never even heard the
word until you just said it, how often does grapple, how do you spell that?
G-R-A-U-P-E-L. And it's actually a pretty
frequent occurrence in parts of the United States. I see it probably four or five, six times a winter
out here. It's more just that, and I'll be honest, a lot of TV meteorologists and folks who see the
media just don't bother reporting on it or talking about it or explaining it because it's easier to
just call it all sleep. But my platform is all about education.
And so if folks can learn something new, yeah, let's talk about grapple.
What is one thing about weather that you think people never really hear much about or don't really understand?
You know, one of the things that I find really interesting is that there's something called precipitation efficiency,
which is really a figure that tells us how much of a raindrop evaporates before hitting the ground, because every raindrop is going to
lose some of its mass on the way down. The highest precipitation efficiency comes in tropical storms
and hurricanes, because the entire moisture, the entire column of atmosphere is so moisture loaded
that you don't get much dry air evaporating the raindrops. So the entire thing pretty much falls. Whereas with most thunderstorms might only get 40, 50, 60% precipitation
efficiency, or only about like two thirds of that raindrop actually hitting the ground.
So is that why sometimes it seems that the raindrops are bigger?
Yeah, definitely. If you have bigger raindrops, you have what's called a cool rain process,
which can be a couple of different things. Either you have great precipitation efficiency, the rain is bigger and
it's falling faster, or perhaps you have a more moisture loaded column, or sometimes, and this
is my favorite, the big globules you get of rain can oftentimes be hail that has melted. Remember
in LA even, it might be too warm for hail at the low levels, but once in a while you might get hail that falls way high up at, say, a mile, two miles in the
atmosphere that melts before hitting the ground, but that mass is still sort of intact as a big
drop of rain, whereas other times you might have more what we call stratiform little rain.
Since you're a pretty well-known meteorologist in Washington, D.C., what are the kinds of
questions, interesting things people ask you about the weather?
You'd be surprised by how many messages I get from viewers, listeners, followers
who will say things like, oh my gosh, the moon and the sun are up at the same time today.
I've never seen that.
And I want to say to them, like, that's almost always the case.
It's the case like, you know you know 10 11 days out of every month
but i think people just aren't as observant as they were a generation two generations ago people
look down at their phones all the time yet if they looked up they'd be amazed by what they see so
things like that or one of my favorites is telling folks that when they're watching a meteor shower
shooting star those shooting stars the debris that sparks those beautiful colors, might only be the size of a grain of puffed rice,
but it's moving along at 30, 40, 50 miles per second.
And that's why it burns up in the atmosphere and produces that streak of colors.
And so when people start learning what makes these phenomena
that they've either noticed or been curious about,
it really unlocks this even greater reservoir of curiosity
that I believe is sort of inherent to most people.
I think it's an innate thing that we're curious about the things that we see all the time,
but never really bother to take the time to understand.
One weather question that I don't think I've ever heard the answer to is, in a thunderstorm,
there's lightning, there's electricity.
Where did that come
from where does that electricity originate believe it or not that is one
of the biggest mysteries we still kind of struggle to understand we know how
thunderstorms get charged or something called tribal electrification where
essentially if you have liquid and ice rubbing against each other the ice will
take on a positive charge and the rain will take on a negative charge the the liquid will take on a negative charge. And so the top of thunderstorms
where it's really cold and you have a lot more ice tend to be more positive, whereas the middle,
the innards of the storm are more negative. That means the earth is relatively positive and you
get a spark to jump in between the two. But we don't understand how this reservoir of charge
builds up, how it becomes so incredibly strong that you get
a lightning strike.
Now, we can talk about something called the dielectric breakdown coefficient of aversion
air.
It's a big fancy word to say basically how much of an electric field you have to have
to get a spark to jump through thin air.
That turns out to be three megavolts per meter, which is an incredible amount of charge.
It would be virtually impossible for that charge to build up without being dissipated
just naturally.
However, it turns out that as you have a tiny spark jump, even a half inch, that heats the air around it,
which lowers the resistance, which makes it easier for the rest of that channel to propagate,
which is why lightning oftentimes jumps in 50 to 100-yard little jagged increments.
And, you know, most lightning is only about a half inch thick.
And at last, you might see 30, 40, what we call return strokes or pulses in the course of a second
or two seconds. But yeah, people always find it surprising that it's only about a half inch to an
inch thick. And how does lightning decide where to strike? It is very capricious. So one thing
that we can't see just because, well, you don't want to be that close to the lightning anyway, but one thing we can't really see unless we have good time-lapse and high sensitivity cameras is what we call upward streamers.
So essentially, when a lightning charge is coming down from a cloud, it creates a bunch of little tiny channels that rise up out of the ground. It induces channels that rise up out of the ground,
and we call those upward streamers.
Eventually, one upward streamer will meet
with the downward leader somewhere in the middle,
and that will be the channel
that all the electricity flows through.
But you might have 30, 40, 50 upward streamers.
Picture a bunch of kids in class all raising their hands,
going, oh, pick me, oh, pick me.
The teacher can only pick one.
That's kind of how the lightning is. The lightning, the charge pick me. The teacher can only pick one. That's kind of how the lightning is.
The lightning, the charge going down from the clouds
can only pick one upward streamer.
But where they meet, that now creates this river
for the current to flow through.
And that is what allows these pulses of light.
And in each pulse of light you see with the lightning,
is charges flowing through that channel.
So you're a storm chaser of sorts.
And your books about storm sorts and you know,
your books about storm chasing and your adventures.
What's the point of that?
Do you actually learn something when you chase storms or is it just so cool
that you can't not do it or both?
It's a, it's a little bit of both. The atmosphere is a quintessential teacher.
I see so many meteorologists who are on television or who are wherever and they're doing tornado coverage, but they've never seen a tornado. Or they're talking about a hurricane, but they've never been in a hurricane. Or they're talking about what doing tornado coverage, I can say to folks exactly what they're seeing.
I know what the clouds look like.
I know what the texture of the cloud is, the color, the everything, what the winds are doing.
Not just because I can read the radar adroitly, but because I've been there, I've done this so many times.
I put myself in the path to experience these things.
And since you do put yourself in the path of these things, like a
tornado, like when you see a tornado, what is it that's so cool about it to you? I've seen a couple
of cool things with tornadoes. Unfortunately, oftentimes after tornadoes, you can smell them.
It's like the world's biggest lawnmower churning everything up. You sometimes find dead birds
afterwards, which is pretty sad, but think about the powerful suction. The other, the really cool thing is I've been on a couple of tornadoes where
after the tornado, stuff will start falling from the sky. I'll look out and I'll have to
turn my windshield wipers on because corn is falling from the sky. So cool stuff like that.
It always is painful when you see people's lives disrupted or impacted. But from a scientific
standpoint, it's incredible what we get to see.
One thing I've always thought was pretty cool about the weather
is how different kinds of weather make you feel.
You know, a rainy day can make you feel sad,
or, you know, a sunny day you tend to feel happier,
that, you know, a snowy day has a different feel to it.
A large part of that is actually the olfactory sense of the weather, which sounds a little bit apocryphal. But consider, for example,
the smell of a thunderstorm is two things. One is called petrichor. It is that clean,
fresh scent after or even before a rain where the rain goes down, it enters the pores of plants,
the stomata, and expels gas from the plant so it
smells very piney and very pleasant outside and very clean that's that clean smell we smell
the other thing you're smelling with thunderstorms too is actually ozone lightning is so hot that it
splits up o2 molecules and some recombine into o3 that is ozone which we don't normally have near
the surface but when we do you can smell it because it is something that we can smell three parts per billion.
So like three teaspoons in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, our nose is so sensitive, and oftentimes you get that ozoney smell out ahead of the storm, which is remarkable.
Or, for example, when we talk about fall, there's a very distinct scent of autumn. And I've gone on air here in D.C. and talked about why the air smelled a certain way. And I traced what we were smelling in the district area all the way to pine trees near the Hudson
Bay. And so you're exactly right. There's an emotional connection to the weather. And,
you know, it's partly visual, it's partly auditory, but it's largely olfactory too.
Well, I have to say this conversation has taught me several things about
the weather that I never knew before. So I appreciate you sharing your knowledge.
Matthew Capucci has been my guest. He is an on-air meteorologist at Fox 5 DC in Washington.
And the name of his book is Looking Up, The True Adventures of a Storm Chasing Weather Nerd.
And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show
notes. Thanks for being here, Matthew. Appreciate it. Hey, thank you again so much. I really
appreciate you guys having me on. The next time you have to deal with something stressful or
unpleasant, consider humming before you do it. Humming can actually do wonders at relieving stress and activating those all-important
alpha brainwaves. Just 60 seconds of humming will reduce levels of anxiety and leave you feeling
more grounded and confident. You can hum anything you like, a favorite tune or a healing hum of just
the letter M or N. To get the full advantage of your hum,
concentrate on the soothing vibrations you're creating
and find a sweet spot that feels good on your vocal cords
and sounds good to your ear.
And that is something you should know.
I'm sure your mother has told you many times
that it's always polite to share.
So I hope you'll be polite and share this podcast with
someone you know, and that'll make your mother very happy. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening
today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep
and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder
rocks the isolated Montana community.
Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy
Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.
She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.
Enter federal agent V.B.
Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.
The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,
unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law,
her religious convictions, and her very own family.
But something more sinister than murder is afoot,
and someone is watching Ruth.
Chinook.
Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan.
Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.
Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine,
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Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth
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The Heresies of Redolf Bantwine
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